Toilet bowls are generally connected to water supply connections, and flushing a toilet bowl can be accomplished automatically or by pressing a handle. However, the stain and the bad odour of a toilet bowl cannot be eliminated by flushing with clean water. The effect from flushing with clean water is usually not remarkable.
Toilet bowls require care to prevent the buildup of deposits and/or bacteria growth and to reduce bad odors. Traditionally, toilet bowls are cleaned and disinfected manually with cleaning and/or sanitizing agents and manual hand work. This is a hard and not desirable labor that people don't like.
In order to eliminate this undesirable task various toilet bowl cleaners have been proposed in the past, for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,777,670. In fact are well known in the market the products used for toilet cleaning and disinfection that avoid manual scrubbing. One type of dispenser comprises a solid block of cleansing and freshening substances that are suspended from the rim of a toilet bowl in a container that is placed in the path of the flushing water. A portion of the solid block is delivered into the toilet every flushing.
Other toilet bowl cleaning solutions use a liquid cleaning substance that is delivered into the toilet bowl. For example U.S. Pat. No. 6,178,564 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,334, and PCT International Publication Nos. WO 99/66139 and WO 99/66140 all devices or substances that are capable of being suspended from the rim of a toilet bowl.
Other toilet bowl devices use an aerosol that is delivered through a conduit attached to the toilet bowl rim. For example U.S. Pat. No. 3,178,070.
Trigger-sprayer bottles represent a very recognizable packaging for spray cleaning products. Trigger sprayers were developed decades ago by companies as AFA Corp, Owens, and Calmar, and now these sprayers are very conventional and familiar, available at low cost from many distributors. Usually these devices are a combination of a blow-molded bottles, with conventional trigger sprayer, and a straw-type dip-tube positioned down into the bottle. However, these devices cannot be used to spray in areas as under toilet bowl rim due to his ergonomie. As a possible solution inverted spraying has been described in the prior art. For example U.S. Pat. No. 6,293,441 (Tasaki et al.); U.S. Pat. No. 5,979,712 (Montaner et al.); U.S. Pat. No. 5,775,548 (Hohmann et al.) and WO2011/090823 (PCT/US2011/020304) each describe invertible sprayers.
Although, as we have seen, there are various treatments, devices and systems commercially available to address the root of the toilet cleaning, the present invention is concerned with a cost-effective device that is capable of delivering a cleaning and/or refreshing and/or sanitizing substance in a upright position, wherein the device is configured to be operated more efficiently to improve the cleaning, it is more user convenient and more efficient that previous devices.
Drawbacks of the existing solutions that will be solved with our invention:
An embodiment of a toilet cleaner device as is set forth in the foregoing is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,611,465. The known toilet cleaning device constitutes an integrated device having an automatic liquid soap dispenser and a guided flow tube. The dispenser is provided with a timer-activated device, and the guided flow tube is connected to the water supply connection of the toilet bowl. The liquid soap is squeezed through the guided flow tube into the water supply connection, thereby allowing the water to be mixed with the liquid soap for flushing and cleaning the toilet bowl.
It is a disadvantage of the known toilet cleaner device that in order to do his task it works automatically that means to lose efficiency. Several doses could be applied one over the other without flushing, just wasting a lot of active substance and harming the environment.
Other solutions as proposed on U.S. Pat. No. 4,777,670, U.S. Pat. No. 6,178,564 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,334, and PCT International Publication Nos. WO 99/66139 and WO 99/66140, are toilet rim mounted and they have not access with the chemical ingredients to hidden surfaces in the toilet bowl reducing dramatically the efficacy of the solution. The present invention is user-controlled, and for this reason the user can apply the chemical agent in the area where bacteria's or contaminants are building up.
Other solutions as U.S. Pat. No. 8,220,080 they have not solution for user interaction with the device in case that device is fit permanently or temporally inside the toilet bowl or device could be in contact with dirty and/or unsafe and/or unsanitized areas. The present invention has specific solutions in order user is not forced to touch product areas that have been in contact with unsafe toilet bowl surfaces due to his upright position use.